A former WAR's Paradigm Shift

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Originally Posted by Kuwagami

Making tanks become beefy dps doesn't appeal to tanks. It appeals to wannabe dps.

Thing is though, SE solved the lack of tanks. Now you have WARs and DRKs everywhere. Even I can at least acknowledge that.


Once again, come at me. Challenge me on my tanking ability, and I'll be happy.

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SE appealed to some people who would like to be more than just a damage sponge, allowing them to be able to dish out a pretty good beating as well. To be able to not only take a beating, but dish out one as well (when you're comfortable with the former) is far more interesting for me.

They should have just made the actuall tankingjob more intresting by introducing more active mitigation, and making agromanagement actually matter. Making a tankingclass turn towards dps to make the class more "advanced/intersting" is just a stupid way of making tanking more appealing.

Anyone who is an experienced MMO player understands the idea of how rare competent tanks are. When I played WoW from Vanilla up through late BC, I would get as many tells asking to tank as I would RMT tells when I was still on a NA FFXIV server.

So please, before you comment, understand that context.

There is a reason why the basics of tanking in this game are relatively simple and the complexity of tanking is optional / only necessary in some progression content. If you made aggro generation harder, the already crappy state of DF tanks losing aggro to over-geared or even just competent DPS would get significantly worse. Tanks would still be accountable for DPS checks because their aggro generation would bottle-neck DPS. If every tank had to play like PLDs do pre-shield oath, the game would be very different and I'm pretty damn sure that the mass majority of people would dislike it.

If I had a dollar for every time a tank in this game wiped a raid because they mistimed or forgot about the already existing activated mitigation they have, I would probably have enough money to buy a small country. If you further complicate the mitigation requirements of content, you are making it so that instead of being able to carry mediocre tanks that can't DPS through content with the combined DPS of 6 other players, you are walled behind the competency of your tanks and at the complete mercy of being able to find tanks skilled enough to survive the content.

Those two things added together would result in a sharp decrease in the tank population. Part of it would be due to a massive increase in the pressure of the role and the harassment tanks would receive over their failures. Another part would just be due to the increase in the skill floor of the class immediately making a huge portion of less-skilled tanks unqualified to tank anything.

I am by no means in favor of the current tanking meta. I tanked for years in WoW when tanks did literally almost no damage and greatly enjoyed stacking every single mitigation stat I could. But, I don't think it'd be healthy for the game to change to the mitigation meta a minority of vocal tanks want.

I think most raiders recognize that tank DPS wasn't really an issue until A3S and A4S. At that point, the tuning of 2 fights is probably more to blame than anything else for the state of tanking. If DPS wasn't as mandatory and PLDs were clearing content just as fast because raid DPS was more than sufficient to pass the DPS checks, we'd be living in a very different world right now.

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Originally Posted by Brian_

Anyone who is an experienced MMO player understands the idea of how rare competent tanks are. When I played WoW from Vanilla up through late BC, I would get as many tells asking to tank as I would RMT tells when I was still on a NA FFXIV server.

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As a career long MMO player who has done every single conceivable role for the better part of a 14 year run in RPGs using variations of the Trinity system

Anyone saying one role is harder than the other is full of it. They -all- require a certain mindset and effort. Healing, tank, DPS, support, and everything in between.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

As a career long MMO player who has done every single conceivable role for the better part of a 14 year run in RPGs using variations of the Trinity system

Anyone saying one role is harder than the other is full of it. They -all- require a certain mindset and effort. Healing, tank, DPS, support, and everything in between.

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I'm not saying one role is harder than the other. I'm saying competent tanks were rarer in that context. Harder =/= rarer.

It's just assumtion that it would cause the tankpopulation to decrease. Not say you're 100% wrong about some tanks not tanking anymore if it was made "more tanking focused", but at the same time I think there'd be quite a few people who might try out or return to tanking if it was made less of a "dps+some other stuff" role.

Also, the criteria for a "competent" tank shouldn't be how much dps he can push out while tanking. Dumbed down gamedesign have led to this, nothing else.

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Originally Posted by Brian_

Anyone who is an experienced MMO player understands the idea of how rare competent tanks are. Another part would just be due to the increase in the skill floor of the class immediately making a huge portion of less-skilled tanks unqualified to tank anything.

I am by no means in favor of the current tanking meta. I tanked for years in WoW when tanks did literally almost no damage and greatly enjoyed stacking every single mitigation stat I could. But, I don't think it'd be healthy for the game to change to the mitigation meta a minority of vocal tanks want.

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So, because you consider the bulk of tanks to be incompetent, Square Enix should not change the current system due to the fact these incompetent tanks cannot do more than dps. I don't agree with this assessment, but then, I'm not in FFXIV cutting edge content.

The thing that was drilled into me from 9 years of WoW was a raid's success or failure was based on how well the team played as a whole. Sure, people made mistakes. There were wipes.

But, we dusted off our pants, did a quick review of what worked and what didn't, and jumped into the fray again. If Square Enix changed to a more active mitigation model, tanks would adapt.

However, like you, I don't think this is the way to go. Simply, I believe the best course is to mix up the raids so each tank could play to its strengths in certain fights while letting other tanks to shine in other fights.

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I think most raiders recognize that tank DPS wasn't really an issue until A3S and A4S. At that point, the tuning of 2 fights is probably more to blame than anything else for the state of tanking. If DPS wasn't as mandatory and PLDs were clearing content just as fast because raid DPS was more than sufficient to pass the DPS checks, we'd be living in a very different world right now.

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Exactly! The issue isn't the tanks. It's the current raid design.

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Originally Posted by Yonanja

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Within the context of what I said, your competency as a tank has nothing to do with your DPS. I said that back in the earlier WoW days where your suggested tanking meta existed, competent tanks were incredibly rare. Despite the player-base being maybe 6~10 million at the time, you had a handful of tanks on even the most populated servers who were good enough to tank the hardest content.

I'm not really saying that some tanks will quit tanking if the meta shifts away from DPS and back to more "old-school" tanking. I'm saying that if you change tank design in that way, there will be a lot of tanks who can no longer hold aggro or stay alive. So, even if the population doesn't decrease, the amount of effective tanks will decrease.

The logic is not hard to understand. Instead of pushing buttons in a set rotation to generate damage and min-maxing their stances or CDs to push DPS, they will be doing the same thing but instead generate enmity. Assuming you don't just make tanking easier (which goes against your idea of dumbed down game design), this creates some obvious issues. A small minority of tanks actually do good DPS but a comfortable majority of tanks have sufficient enmity generation. So, while good end-game tanks still are rare, most tanks satisfy the general needs of the role. If you change it so enmity generation is on par in complexity with DPS and mitigation is more demanding, then you will now have a small minority of tanks that actually generate good enmity or can stay alive. Do you now see the issues this will create with DF, PF, and the tank population in general?

The reality is the current design of tanking is very casual friendly and it helps the health of a largely casual game. Casuals have an easy time staying alive with straight forward activated mitigation (though some still fail at it) and very easy enmity generation (1 button AoE enmity, 3 button single target enmity). At the same time, there is still room for hard-core players to shine through tank DPS. The role has a low skill-floor which makes it accessible for most content and a high skill ceiling which makes it challenging in the hardest content.

I am not doubting that some tanks will adapt just fine to whatever changes that SE makes. Good players are good players. It doesn't matter what they're doing, they will remain good. The problem is what happens to the majority of the player-base which is largely casual when you raise the skill floor of a role.

As a healer I agree with your original post. Nothing worse than a tank that pulls too much. And you know they pulled too much when your ilvl is good and your cd's are all gone and mana drained and the dps TP is all gone as well. No excuse for tanks that do that shit. It comes to a point where you're carrying a bad tank and dps with uber heals.

I will say PLD is much easier to heal. But runs are almost annoyingly slower.

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Originally Posted by Brian_

The problem is what happens to the majority of the player-base which is largely casual when you raise the skill floor of a role.

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That "largely casual majority" just won't play their job at the fullest...which won't be an issue since they also won't tackle any content that requires them to play their role at the fullest, or they'll do it when the content is old with far higher gear to help them.